MySpace Becoming an OpenID Provider

According to Mike Arrington, MySpace will be announcing this week support for OpenID. Not total support though, one-way support. If you don’t know what OpenID is, it is a standard for enabling a single sign on across the web. You only need to remember one login and one password. It has been a fantasy of the web geeks for years and it has slowly become a reality.

While Arrington doesn’t have details on MySpace’s implementation of the OpenID standard, I can guarantee you that most users will have absolutely no idea what it is. Mike Arrington suggests that there is a land grab to become the top OpenID issuer. I think that this is only partially true since by the time this all plays out, many users are going to have more than one OpenID issued. This ends up producing a similar problem to those people with multiple email addresses.

This is the biggest OpenID news since Yahoo announced that they would be supporting OpenID back in January. At this point it continues to be more buzz than anything else but eventually all of the support for OpenID will contribute to a more open web.

Unfortunately, I think we are still far away because none of the providers currently enable third-party OpenIDs to log on to their sites. This is a substantial barrier to an open web but at least they are making the initial steps. Hopefully we will soon see these companies open further.